teknoarcanist said:
I don't think Mantis's aim was 'break immersion over his knee' and mock the player for taking the game so seriously *. Rather, I think the effect was to enhance immersion by expanding it into dimensions the player had not previously had a game expand into.
I agree with nearly all of what you argue, but I thought I might respond to a couple points.
This depends on the slipperiness of a word like "immersion," and how we've come to use it. You're right, for example, that Mantis' controller spazzing and save file reading enters into a new space, with new boundaries and dimensions - I'd call this tactical and spatial immersion, of the sort that VR technologies have been sawing away at for some time now. But what about narrative immersion, the more casual usage that describes how 'real' a game scans at any given time? This requires internal consistency and contiguity - we might forgive Roy Campbell for patiently explaining to Snake what the A button is, but there's simply no in-game analogue to Mantis busting your balls for liking Mario. It's specifically fictional.
These are very different values, but they aren't at cross purposes - in fact, you can fiddle with one to directly heighten another. I disagree with the common notion that when it comes to the vidjagames, 'immersion' is the catch-all value that describes how well a game succeeds. Mantis is a mindfuck exactly once (or, I guess, never, if you're like that guy two posts up who thinks I ruined Christmas) but after that, the fight still works... just on different terms. In all my playthroughs of MGS, that's the moment I look forward to most, even though I know how it's going to shake out. It's fraught, yes, but it's also a little silly, and I appreciate that it blows off some steam. Maybe I like a little fiction in my fiction.
teknoarcanist said:
* The Campbell sequence at the end of Metal Gear Solid 2, I think, serves as a better example of this. It offered less of a sense of personal invasion, and more drew the player to feel surrounded/trapped/betrayed. You were being humiliated like Raiden was being humiliated.
The difference here, I think, is that though the theme of 'virtual vs real' runs through all of MGS2, the ending crushes it in a wave of solemn triplethink. Right after the Naked AI Meltdown bit, you're treated to no less than three speeches, all of which reframe the events of the story. The whole "this is just a game" thing is quickly contextualized by a string of explanations - Roy's circuits was melting down from the virus, and Raiden as VR-trained child soldier isn't so great with the whole real vs false stuff. But with Mantis, there's no 4th wall buttressing: No one shows up and says, "Oh, yeah, that was all nanomachines." He gets to do his freaky voodoo shit, and nobody says boo.
But there's one point that I simply can't contest - ninja-flipping around naked in MGS2 feels really, truly bad. In the words of my biological father, Inigo Montoya: Humiliations galore!
